How Global is Jomon?
Ten thousand years ago — a hunter’s camp beside a cold glacial lake in northern England.
Seven thousand years ago — a volcano dominating the skyline of southern Japan.
And the quiet traces of everyday meals — shells, bones, charcoal — left behind by people who never imagined their lives would one day be reconstructed in laboratories and museums.
Archaeology begins with fragments. Yet sometimes those fragments raise the biggest questions.
What does it mean to live through change?
How do people build societies without farming, cities, or writing?
And how much do humans share, even when separated by oceans, continents, and thousands of years?
These questions have shaped my research for more than three decades. They can be summarised in one phrase that has stayed with me throughout my career: How global is Jomon?
I am very grateful to the Sainsbury Institute for its long-standing support, friendship, and intellectual encouragement. The Sainsbury Institute has been there at key moments in my academic journey, and it is a real pleasure to contribute to this Research Spotlight and to give the March Third Thursday Lecture.
At first glance, Jomon may appear uniquely Japanese: dramatic pottery, long hunter-gatherer traditions, and a prehistoric world far removed from the familiar story of farming societies and early civilisations. Yet the more I have studied Jomon, the more convinced I have become that it is not simply a regional curiosity. It offers a powerful lens through which to think about broader human questions: how people adapt to their environments, how societies organise themselves, and how cultural change unfolds across generations.
People and circumstances
One idea that has guided my work comes from the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who wrote in 1914:
“I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
I first encountered this phrase in the late 1980s — a period of global upheaval, with the end of the Cold War, rapid social change in Japan, and the growing awareness of environmental issues. Ortega’s philosophy struck me as both profound and practical. It suggested that humans are shaped by landscape, climate, social networks, and historical context. Archaeology, with its long-term perspective, seemed to offer a unique way to explore that relationship.
That is what led me to environmental archaeology — and eventually to study in the UK.
Japan, Europe, and deep time
Two research questions have remained central to my work.
The first concerns the deep history of the Japanese archipelago. Modern humans arrived in Japan around 40,000 years ago. Much later, from about 17,000 years ago, pottery technology began to spread, and by around 10,000 years ago large settlements emerged.
This is remarkable because, in many parts of the world, pottery and sedentism are closely linked to farming. In Japan, however, pottery became central within a hunter-gatherer tradition long before agriculture. The long period between roughly 17,000 and 3,000 years ago is known as the Jomon period, one of the world’s longest and most complex hunter-gatherer sequences.
My first question has therefore been: How did Jomon communities adapt to their environments, and what kinds of societies did they create?
Much of my research has been grounded in zooarchaeology — the study of animal remains from archaeological sites. By analysing bones, shells, and other faunal materials, we can reconstruct lifeways: what people ate, how they hunted and fished, and how they interacted with changing environments over long periods.
My second question emerged strongly through comparative work. Europe also has a long hunter-gatherer past. The British Isles in particular share broad similarities with Japan: island geographies, temperate climates, and rich coastal resources, as well as the later arrival of farming from distant regions.
So, I began to wonder: If we compare Japan and Europe across deep time, can we glimpse something more general about humanity?
An archaeological “shock”
During my time in the UK (1995-1996), I was fortunate to work with Mesolithic material from the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire, a glacial landscape with exceptionally rich evidence for human life around 10,000 years ago.
It was there that I experienced one of the most memorable moments of my career. The patterns emerging from the data — settlement choices, seasonal movement, and the social importance of particular places — showed unexpected parallels with aspects of Jomon Japan.
Of course, the cultures and environments were different. But the underlying structures felt surprisingly familiar. That experience strengthened my belief that humans are endlessly creative in producing cultural diversity, yet beneath that diversity there are recurring principles that may be widely shared.
Since then, I have tried, as far as possible, to act as a bridge: introducing Japanese archaeology to international audiences, and bringing perspectives from European archaeology back into Japan.
The Sainsbury Institute as an intellectual home
The Sainsbury Institute has played an important role in this journey. I first visited the Institute in June 2003, invited by Professor Simon Kaner, a close colleague and friend whom I first met at Kyoto University in 1991.
At the time, I was developing a major interdisciplinary research project at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) in Kyoto: NEOMAP (Neolithisation and Modernisation: Landscape History on East Asian Inland Seas) (2005–2012). The project brought together around seventy researchers from eleven countries across archaeology, history, anthropology, geography, linguistics, and environmental science. Its aim was to reconstruct long-term cultural landscape dynamics around the Japan Sea and East China Sea, and to consider how such perspectives could contribute to heritage protection and environmental policy.
The Sainsbury Institute offered generous advice and encouragement during this early stage, and I remain very thankful for that support.
Later, I became involved in establishing the Mount Fuji World Heritage Centre in Shizuoka Prefecture, an interpretation centre dedicated to public engagement and the protection of Mount Fuji as a World Cultural Heritage site.
From May 2018 to March 2020, the Sainsbury Institute welcomed me again as a Handa Japanese Archaeology Fellow, allowing me and my family to spend two precious years in Norwich. For us, the Sainsbury Institute was not only a research institution but also a community — open, international, and intellectually generous.
During that period, I was able to return to writing and research on a wide range of topics, including early pottery traditions and the long history of human–animal relationships in East Asia. I also later had the privilege of contributing to the English Heritage exhibition Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan (2022–2023), an experience that reinforced how strongly Japanese archaeology can resonate with wider publics.
From Jomon to catastrophe archaeology
One of the most important developments to emerge from these years was the beginning of my current focus: catastrophe archaeology.
Through discussions with Dr Peter Jordan — a long-term collaborator and friend since the NEOMAP years — I became increasingly interested in the fact that Japan is one of the most disaster-prone regions on Earth. The archipelago occupies only around 0.25% of the world’s land surface, yet experiences around 10% of global volcanic activity and roughly 20% of the world’s earthquakes.
Over the long Jomon period, disasters must have repeatedly shaped lifeways and population dynamics. At the same time, Japan possesses exceptionally rich archaeological datasets supported by high-resolution chronologies, making it possible to examine cultural impacts of disasters in unusually fine detail.
This work developed into the Nordic–Japan research programme CALDERA, which investigates long-term cultural responses to major natural disasters. Our first case study focuses on the Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) super-eruption in southwestern Japan, one of the largest eruptions of the last 30,000 years (VEI 7). Our aim is not only to document immediate disruption, but to understand survival, adjustment, recovery, and the emergence of new cultural trajectories over multiple generations.
In 2024, CALDERA was awarded Antiquity’s Ben Cullen Prize for outstanding contributions to world archaeology. Building on this momentum, we launched a Swedish Research Council (VR) project in 2025: Surviving the Apocalypse: multidimensional modelling of the impact of a prehistoric megadisaster on people’s lifeworlds, technologies and demography (2025–2029).
Looking ahead
Looking back, I realise that my academic path has always been guided by the desire to connect Jomon research to wider human questions. How do people live through change? How do societies reorganise? How do cultures persist — and transform — across deep time?
The Sainsbury Institute has supported that journey from early on, and I remain deeply grateful. I very much look forward to continuing this shared work, and to welcoming audiences to the Third Thursday Lecture on 19 March.
Further Reading
In case it may be useful for readers who would like to explore some of these themes further, I include below a small selection of related publications.
On disaster, survival, and long-term recovery:
Disaster, survival and recovery: the resettlement of Tanegashima Island following the Kikai-Akahoya ‘super-eruption’, 7.3ka cal BP (Ben Cullen Prize winning article)
On broader population dynamics and comparative perspectives:
Common carp aquaculture in Neolithic China dates back 8,000 years
Populations dynamics in Northern Eurasian forests: a long-term perspective from Northeast Asia
Sainsbury Institute Academic Associate & former Handa Archaeology Fellow (2018-20)